Making shorter games more viable is in everyone’s interests. They’re faster to make, they’re tighter and more focused and arguably they should be cheaper. I think Star Wars Squadrons was a good example of a test-run there. A bit more than half price for a game with around 10 hours of single player content (if you’re…

They do have another full game in the works, The Witcher 4 (which won’t be it’s final title, it’s a spin-off with you controlling another character in the same world).

Cyberpunk v.3 also dropped the date, but everyone seems to want to forget about v.3 so that’s not a huge thing.

The marketing for the game definitely seemed pandering to edgelords, almost to the point where I wondered if CDPR was trying to stealth-con them into buying a game with progressive values, solid trans characters , gay romances and queer themes (albeit often clumsily-handled ones). If their marketing hadn’t been so…

Mankind Divided was supposed to be the start of a new trilogy and there were going to be spin-off games and other things, all under the banner of “Deus Ex Universe”, which had its own special logo. MD sold so poorly that Eidos put all those plans on indefinite hold immediately. So it was clearly a massive…

Not sure what they’re going on about with regard to Skyrim, CP77 is outselling it about 2:1 in the same timeframe. That’s going to drop off much more sharply, I think, and I doubt it’s long tail is going to anything like as impressive. But who knows, people said that about The Witcher 3 and it’s either at sales parity…

I’m not too sure about that. In terms of story missions, there isn’t really much (the only one that comes to mind is helping your cop neighbour avoid committing suicide, which turns into a much more psychologically darker story than I was expecting). There’s also helping River out, but the way that story goes does not…

I get the same impression that the game may have benefited from a tighter, more linear focus like The Witcher 1 and 2 and the Mass Effect games, but I also think that the idea that single-player games now “have” to be open-world to be worthwhile or worth the money has become so baked into the audience that the game…

Urgh, no, there’s absolutely no and should never be a way you’re “supposed to” play an RPG, either pen & paper or in a video game. I’ve seen people play a completely different character in every single game they played, wildly different to themselves, and I’ve seen other people play pretty much just “themselves but in…

The dialogue system was originally developed for Half-Life 2, which is rather bizarre given that was for a game where you couldn’t talk or have dialogue choices. But the idea of moving around a room in first person whilst someone talks to you and they react to things in the room you highlight comes from there. I’m…

Deus Ex: Human Revolution does something similar in its very first mission: if you stop and loot your HQ tower first before going on the mission or otherwise faff around, the first mission becomes a lot harder because the enemy have had more time to prepare for you than if you just rush to the chopper and go straight…

Both of the 2010s DE games are also maybe a third the length of CP77, if you’re being rather generous (including the DLC).

Mankind Divided sold so badly that apparently if they ever do a new Deus Ex game it will probably be a reboot. Eidos also have ~5 games in varying stages of development at the moment and none of them in the DE universe.

I did wonder if that was their original plan. The 2013 CP77 trailer had your character as someone who’d gone full cyberpsychosis, but MaxTac had taken them down and then recruited them into the organisation, which would be a perfect way of sending you out on discrete missions.

I used the power legs which I think are the better way to go. You can jump right up onto building roofs and you often find skylights or hatches that give you an alternate entry point.

I specced V for hand-to-hand for the street fights, so when I reached Oda I was pretty beefed up for unarmed combat, so I just punched him into unconsciousness, which was unexpectedly cool. It also means you don’t kill him, and I got a polite text afterwards thanking me for not popping his head like a grapefruit.

The game seems to go out of its way not to have V cross the fixers, which feels unrealistic. One time you are given the choice to betray the mission objective and do the “right thing,” the person you’re saving basically squares it with your fixer and you can keep working for them, even though you’ve kind of just…

The team at Harebrained are probably already on it. They’ve recently resurrected and revisited Jordan Weisman’s first two IP (Shadowrun and Battletech) so Crimson Skies is the next logical choice. It does require them to do a deal with Microsoft, but they seem open to that.

I’m wondering if this is another bug, because in my game dildos are so rare that they crop up only in places where they make sense (some apartments, sex shops etc). I’ve certainly never encountered one in random trash outdoors (where it’s perfectly possible to accidentally stumble across an elite powered shotgun that…

I agree the area towers is not an ideal mechanic, and it’s interesting to see more open-world games are dropping them. The problem is that they’re not replacing them with anything as reliable. In Watch_Dogs 2 I get the impression they had the towers in during development and then dropped them (the actual towers are…